King's Gambit: A Son, a Father, and the World's Most Dangerous Game

by Paul Hoffman

  Short lost the game and was lambasted in the chess press for employing the Budapest and gambiting away his king pawn. “A painful move for me to see,” four-time U.S. champion Yasser Seirawan wrote in his monthly magazine Inside Chess. “I had expected Nigel to try a few opening surprises, since his normal stodgy Queen’s Gambit Declined is Karpov’s bread and butter. But the Budapest Gambit? In Volume 1, Issue 20, we published a bust to the Budapest that still nets me points!”

  Short explained to me that the Budapest wasn’t responsible for his defeat. “I was a little bit worse out of the opening but the middle game was OK,” Short explained. “I went down to defeat in time pressure. I had no intention of playing the Budapest again—win, lose, or draw. It was like a condom, to be thrown away after use and not used again in any circumstances. It was meant to get him off his stride, to constantly pose problems, to show him that I can try anything. To make him worry that I might play any odd opening, not just the mainstream ones his trainers had spoon-fed him.”

  WHEN I REJOINED THE CHESS WORLD AS AN ADULT, I DECIDED TO TAKE UP the Budapest, inspired in part by Short’s bold example in 1992. If it had been good enough for the third highest-rated player in the world, it was certainly good enough for me. The main attraction was that my opponents wouldn’t be booked up on it, and if they tried to hold the pawn, I’d get the kind of tactical position I liked. At the time I was unaware of Seirawan’s commentary on Short’s game or his published refutation of the opening.

  I ventured to Las Vegas in 2001 to play in the National Open, one of the few annual U.S. tournaments with a respectable prize fund. The tournament was really a chess festival, with grandmasters giving simultaneous exhibitions and lectures before and after the games. I signed up for a game with Yasser Seirawan, in the first simul I’d play in as an adult. (This was the first time I had met Seirawan, the simul having occurred before we did our commentary together on ESPN.) I was hoping to do better than I had against Larsen thirty-five years earlier. There were twenty-five opponents, and Seirawan, dressed in a double-breasted brown suit, exuded charm and confidence as he dashed around the boards that were positioned on long cafeteria tables arranged in a large square. A group of female admirers watched him—as befitted the only chess player to be named “Bachelor of the Year” by Cosmopolitan magazine. On my board he opened with the queen pawn, and on my second move I offered my king pawn à la the Budapest. He gave me a patronizing smile—which now I know meant, “You sucker! You should have read my article!”—and immediately grabbed the pawn.

  Soon he moved his queen to an exposed position in order to protect the extra pawn. I gained tempi with my knights by chasing the grand dame back to Seirawan’s side of the board, and I fractured his queenside pawns by exchanging my dark-squared bishop for one of his knights. I reached the kind of position that I often obtained in my local club when I played the Budapest successfully against fellow amateurs. After an hour Seirawan had disposed of the other twenty-three participants. I was the only player left, and I tried not to appear indecorously gleeful as I enjoyed the moment. Alas, it was only a moment, because it occurred to me that the defeat of all of my compatriots meant that he and I were now playing mano a mano. I downed a cup of water and told myself to stay calm. I remembered my childhood drama coach teaching us how to be still and tranquil by “acting” like a wall or a Japanese rock garden. I don’t know whether I was a convincing wall as a kid, but in the simul I tried to project wallness and certainly failed—I was much too excited. “Don’t fuck up, Paul,” I told myself. “Don’t fuck up.”

  Seirawan pulled up a chair, turned it around backward, and straddled it with the swagger of a cowboy mounting a horse. “And then there was one!” he said in a voice that was at once cheerful and ominous, echoing the words of the Agatha Christie story in which ten strangers are summoned to a mansion on a remote island and slaughtered, one after another.

  “Very good,” I replied, “but in Agatha Christie, the host never makes it off the island, either.”

  “Really? Is that so?” He studied me carefully, surprised, I think, by my chutzpah. “I intend to make it off the island.”

  “Then I’m joining you.”

  “Is that a draw offer?”

  I examined the board. I thought I had the better position, but I wasn’t sure. And if I did have the better game, it wasn’t against some yokel at my club but against an American chess legend—and I was his only opponent. The prudent thing for me to do was to offer a draw, but prudence, I thought, was for wimps. Don’t be an idiot, another part of me advised. Take the draw while you can.

  An unwritten rule of chess prohibits the player who stands worse from proposing a cessation of hostilities, so Seirawan, who had the worst of the position, was not about to propose a draw directly but instead was clearly feeling me out. (Even if the position had been equal, as the stronger player he might have been too prideful to offer a draw directly.) “I want to play on,” I heard myself blurt out. Paul, you’re crazy, I thought.

  “Very well,” he said. He took off his jacket and rolled up his sleeves. He checked his watch and said, “If you want to play, you should move.”

  My courage abruptly evaporated. I was afraid of moving too fast and blundering but was uncertain about the etiquette of how much time I could take. Normally in a simul you’re supposed to move the instant the grandmaster arrives at the board, but that assumes he is playing multiple games. Here he was already at the board, camped out in the chair. I hoped he did not expect me to respond instantaneously whenever he moved. So I asked him, in a shakier voice than I intended, “Am I allowed to think at all?”

  He could have pounced on my uncertainty, but instead this heffalump showed a soft side. “It’s an interesting position,” he said. “You can think a bit if you want.”

  “Thank you,” I said, but I still moved fairly rapidly, not wanting to take advantage of his reasonableness and keep him late for his next engagement. We reached an ending with even material—two rooks, a bishop, and four pawns each—but I had an outside passed pawn that had designs on reaching Seirawan’s home rank and becoming a queen. He eventually needed to give up his bishop to stop the coronation, and he netted two pawns in the process. So now I had a rook, a bishop, and two pawns against his rook and four pawns. But all of our pawns were on the same side of the board, so there was not too much play in the position and we agreed to a draw on the forty-seventh move.

  “Nice game,” he said graciously and shook my hand. I asked him to autograph the chessboard, and he signed the e4 square. “So much for my refutation of the Budapest,” he said. He looked around at the now near-empty room. “It’s good that no GMs are watching,” he joked, “or they’ll know to play this stuff against me.” He was the perfect gentleman grandmaster, a man who played hard yet remained civil. He spent ten minutes with me going over the game. If there was a chess heaven, this was it. Not only had I achieved every amateur’s dream of making a grandmaster sweat, I had made him reassess an opening—albeit an obscure and ultimately dubious opening. Of course, it would have been even sweeter if I had won. Still, our encounter sustained me for days. Whenever I found my mood turning sour for reasons that had nothing to do with chess, I’d remind myself that I had been the last man standing and never in danger of going down.

  SHORT HAD LOST WITH THE BUDAPEST OWING TO NERVOUS PLAY IN TIME trouble. Yet he emerged from that first game as the psychological victor because of the chance discovery of an impostor in the ranks of Karpov’s otherwise illustrious team of opening theoreticians, end-game experts, doctors, masseuses, and fitness gurus. The Russian’s entourage included a parapsychologist named Rudolf Zagainov.

  Parapsychologists—specialized hypnotists who supposedly use mental telepathy to influence other people’s minds—were a peculiarly Soviet phenomenon. In a state that monitored your private activities through a network of secret informers, it was easy to believe in the existence of so-called experts who could read and control your mind. Short was not a
believer but was troubled nonetheless “by this creepy man who sat in the front row, stared at me, and took copious notes. Before the match a friend of mine said she’d sit next to him and counteract his voodoo.”

  When Zaiganov got up from his seat at the end of the first game, he dropped one of his pages of notes. Short had a look, expecting it to be in Russian. “Amazingly he had written in English, ‘I love you’ and ‘I have no money,’” Short recalled. “It was obvious he was a fraud. He was sitting there getting paid by Karpov and was practicing his English which he hoped to try on some girl, like my young cousin Jayne who had come with us to baby-sit Kyveli. After reading the sheet, I thought, He can do whatever he wants. He’s just a joke. Karpov probably took him on because he thought it didn’t do any harm and might rattle me. Strangely it had the reverse effect. I got strength from this, from realizing that of everything Karpov had at his disposal, he chose a total bozo as a crutch.” Short’s hotel suite was adjacent to Karpov’s, and at night, to mock Rudolph Zagainov, Short blasted “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer” on his electric guitar. He wondered whether Zagainov had learned sufficient English to understand the joke.

  The loss of the first game with Black did not set Short back much. As White, he was unstoppable, scoring 41?2 points out of 5. “I stuck it to him real good, way up him,” Short said. “The guy was getting raped. I should have won some with Black. My QGA turned out to be an inspired choice. He had become so calcified in his approach to chess that he wanted to be on autopilot for the opening.” Short forced Karpov to think for himself early in the game and threw his tempo off. The former world champion did not manage the clock well—on four occasions he came within five seconds of his flag falling.

  In the Queen’s Gambit Accepted played in the fifth game, Short was particularly proud of the sixth move that he sprang on an unsuspecting Karpov. Short called it the Beck’s Beer Variation, and it was the result of the preparation he’d done with Kavalek in Reston, Virginia.7 One evening Short and Kavalek were drinking Beck’s after they finished their official chess work for the day. They were sitting by a board on which there was a QGA position that they had looked at earlier. “I just reached out suddenly, beer in hand,” Short recalled, “and made the pawn move…c5. We both started laughing because it looked like such a stupid move. Then Lubosh responded as White, we each made a few moves, and I got a perfectly decent position. So now we had a big laugh about this. We set it up again, and we tried something else. Again I got a decent position.” Even though the move was Short’s idea, in the haze of beer he was still not sure that it was sound, but later he couldn’t find anything wrong with it, either.

  When he tried the Beck’s Beer Variation against Karpov, the grandmaster commentators in the press room said Short had an atrocious position and claimed that something had gone terribly wrong with his preparation. For a few moves Karpov responded logically and reasonably quickly. On the fifth or sixth move into the variation, he went into a forty-five-minute think. “It dawned on him,” Short said, “that the position was not as good for him as he had initially judged. I could tell that he still thought he was slightly better. But he was looking and looking and couldn’t find a way to keep his imagined advantage. Then I could tell from his body language that he was now concerned about maintaining equality, but didn’t see that, either. He finally moved and I got an advantage, then a clear advantage, and then a decisive advantage. Then I screwed up and we drew. It was very annoying. I was clearly winning.”

  In the seventh game, when Short was ahead by one point, he deviated from his opening strategy and played the Queen’s Gambit Declined. He was an expert in the QGD, but so was Karpov, and it was an opening that the Russian expected him to play. “It was a huge mistake,” said Short. “I turned to it because I was very comfortable with it. But it played into his strength, and he pressed and tortured me in a typical Karpovian way. It was like the tiger against the heffalump in the open field. The tiger was strong but the heffalump was stronger. So in the next game it was back to the swamp,” where the heffalump got stuck in the quagmire. When the tenth game was completed, the tiger emerged victorious by a two-point margin, 6–4.

  “I was very high afterward,” Short told me. “Many people described the match as the end of an era for Karpov, and in a sense it was. Not that he didn’t have good results later. Perhaps he had the best year of his life in 1994, when he won Linares with some ridiculous number of points [nine wins, four draws, and zero losses]. But it was Indian summer for him. I had exposed the flaws in his chess.”

  WHEN I LOOKED AT NIGEL SHORT’S GAMES IN CHESSBASE, I WAS PLEASED TO see that in several key encounters in the twenty-first century he assayed the Evans Gambit, a romantic throwback like the King’s Gambit to the heady attacking days of the nineteenth century. I had often employed the Evans Gambit in my youth because it was a favorite of Paul Morphy, the pre–Civil War prodigy from New Orleans. When I first became a student of chess, I was eager to emulate Morphy’s approach—the moves he made on the chessboard were flashy and powerful, while his overall decorum, at the board and away from it, was quiet and respectful. The Evans Gambit is a double-king-pawn opening in which White offers a pawn on the fourth move in order to deflect Black’s bishop. In return for the pawn, White obtains control of the center and a lead in development. In the Evans Gambit, the pyrotechnics begin early because White presses hard to convert these transient advantages into a kingside attack before Black is able to catch up in development and exploit his extra pawn.

  There was a clarity to Morphy’s thrilling chessboard aggression that I found particularly instructive. His games illustrated the virtues of free and quick development. “Help your pieces so they can help you” was how he put it. Players before him favored cheap tactical tricks, launching early speculative sorties with only a couple of pieces. Games were won because the aggressor set a trap into which the opponent obligingly stepped. Morphy was the first to recognize that if the intended prey kept a cool head and simply sidestepped the snare, the potential trapper would be left with an inferior, if not a losing, position because his pieces were overextended.

  Morphy’s approach was every bit as exciting and bellicose as his predecessors’ (and against amateurs he often went directly for the jugular), but he pioneered the purer strategy of amassing all his forces before launching a full-scale assault. In other words, he built up the ground troops before commencing air strikes. His well-prepared king-hunt would then unfold with atomic-clock precision and his helpless adversary would be outgunned.8 Morphy also had better defensive skills than his contemporaries, and so he could rebuff any premature, rash thrusts of theirs. For me, Morphy had seemed to solve the dilemma of how to play chess with gusto and force and also do it with integrity and honor. He was an assassin on the chessboard and a mensch away from it.

  As a child, I was also drawn to Morphy because of the way he came across in old engravings and photographs that I studied. He was a slender, well-dressed young man who always wore a bow tie. One of his friends described the five-foot, four-inch champion as having “a face like a young girl in her teens” and kid-size shoes “into which not one woman in a hundred thousand could have squeezed her feet.” The pictures showed him surrounded by older men who towered over him or were twice his girth, and yet he emasculated them on the chessboard and made it look so easy. I was not short or frail like Morphy, but at various times in elementary school I was terrorized by bullies, and chess appealed to me because it didn’t reward physical aggression.

  Morphy’s career was meteoric. In the fall of 1857, the twenty-year-old phenomenon, who had already earned a law degree from the University of Louisiana but was not of legal age to be an attorney, traveled to New York City and won the First American Chess Congress, a knockout event among the country’s best players. Although his demeanor at the chessboard was completely proper—he sat motionless and avoided eye contact whenever it was his opponent’s turn—his stony composure unnerved his adversaries. They didn’t unde
rstand how he could sit for hours without food or drink. “When one plays with Morphy,” one of his adversaries wrote, “the sensation is as queer as the first electric shock, or first love, or chloroform, or any entirely novel experience. As you sit down at the board opposite him, a certain sheepishness steals over you.”

  On his twenty-first birthday, June 22, 1858, Morphy arrived in Europe to slay the top players in the salons of London and Paris. He brought honor to the United States by becoming one of the first Americans in any field to shine on the international stage. The whole nation, even those who could not tell a knight from a bishop, was proud of his accomplishments. Cigars, packaged foods, and sports teams were named after him. His games were reported move for move on the front page of The New York Times and praised in poems and orations by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, James Russell Lowell, Oliver Wendell Holmes, and Louis Agassiz. Artists competed to sculpt his bust.

  In Europe, Morphy was also lionized and feted by aristocrats. The Duke of Brunswick invited him to join the Count Isouard de Vauvenargue in their box at the Paris Opera. During The Barber of Seville, the duke set up chess pieces and implored the American to take on the two of them.9 Although the noblemen consulted each other before every move, they succumbed to a dramatic queen sacrifice that led inescapably to checkmate a move later. At seventeen moves, the game was cruelly short. I remember the sacrifice making a strong impression on me when I looked at it as a child.

  My father shared my interest in Morphy and other great players of yesteryear. He seemed to know every used bookstore in New York City, and we searched together for old books about Morphy. But my dad also went out of his way to make sure I knew that my childhood chess hero’s life had ended badly.